Abstract
A foundational goal of linguistics is to investigate whether shared features of the human cognitive system can explain how linguistic patterns are distributed across languages. In this paper we report a series of artificial language learning experiments which aim to test a hypothesised link between cognition and a persistent regularity of morpheme order: number morphemes (e.g., plural markers) tend to be ordered closer to noun stems than case morphemes (e.g., accusative markers) (Universal 39; Greenberg, 1963). We argue that this typological tendency may be driven by learners’ bias towards orders that reflect scopal relationships in morphosyntactic and semantic composition (Bybee, 1985; Rice, 2000; Culbertson & Adger, 2014). This bias is borne out by our experimental results: learners—in the absence of any evidence on how to order number and case morphology—consistently produce number closer to the noun stem. We replicate this effect across two populations (English and Japanese speakers). We also find that it holds independent of morpheme position (prefixal or suffixal), degree of boundedness (free or bound morphology), frequency, and which particular case/number feature values are instantiated in the overt markers (accusative or nominative, plural or singulative). However, we show that this tendency can be reversed when the form of the case marker is made highly dependent on the noun stem, suggesting an influence of an additional bias for local dependencies. Our results provide evidence that universal features of cognition may play a causal role in shaping the relative order of morphemes.
Highlights
IntroductionHuman languages are incredibly diverse in the way they combine meaningful units (i.e., morphemes) with each other
Human languages are incredibly diverse in the way they combine meaningful units with each other
We make four changes: (i) we use overt markers that are both unfamiliar to English speakers, (ii) we present the markers as affixes bound to the noun stem in text, (iii) we explicitly introduce the meanings of both markers, and (iv) we eliminate all trials in which stem + number Noun Phrase (NP) occur in isolation (Number Only) both in training and testing
Summary
Human languages are incredibly diverse in the way they combine meaningful units (i.e., morphemes) with each other. Many languages concatenate morphemes to lexical bases to create morphologically complex words, like the English word “neighbourhood-s”. Languages differ in how many morphemes typically attach to a base, in whether they attach before or after that base, in what precise meanings are encoded in morphemes, in whether there are one-to-one mappings between morphemes and meanings, and so on. Some patterns of morpheme order occur more frequently across the lan guages of the world, while others are rare or even unattested. There is a rich literature which aims to explain patterns of morpheme order within and across languages. We are interested in whether uni versal cognitive or psycholinguistic mechanisms might play a causal role in shaping morpheme order cross-linguistically
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